Launched is not finished

Because the cost structure is different, not the engineering. A traditional agency price carries account management, bench time, and a project team that rotates — you are paying for the org chart as well as the work. We price the work. The stack is also one we run in production for our own products, so the scaffolding every project needs — accounts, payments, deployment, testing — is not rebuilt from zero at your expense. What is not different: who writes the code, and how carefully.

Continuity is designed in rather than promised. Source code, hosting, and the domain live in your accounts from day one, not ours — you can revoke our access this afternoon and carry on. Everything needed to run and deploy the project is configuration committed to your repository rather than knowledge in somebody's head: the build steps, the deploy lane, the tests and the monitoring are all reviewable, and runnable by any competent developer without us. Partnerships run month to month after the three-month minimum, either side can end with 30 days' notice, and ending one includes a written handover rather than a cliff. No vendor of any size can honestly guarantee availability, so the question worth asking all of them is what you are left holding if it stops. Here it is everything.

Fixed-price projects are invoiced 50% when the agreement is signed and 50% on acceptance. Platform builds are split 40% on signature, 40% when the core workflow is live and 20% on acceptance. Invoices are payable within 7 days by bank transfer, and work starts when the first payment arrives. Monthly partnerships are invoiced monthly in advance, with a three-month minimum and then 30 days' notice on either side. Prices are in euros and exclude VAT, and the payment schedule is written into the order you sign before any work begins.

A fair question to ask anyone, so here are the terms rather than a reassurance. The first payment reserves our time, and it is not refunded if you end the project simply because you changed your mind. It is refunded if we materially break the agreement and do not put it right within 14 days of your written notice. From the first week you get a live build at least weekly, so you can judge the work early, and either side can end a project on 10 business days' notice, paying only for the work done up to then. If you would rather start smaller, we will scope the smallest useful piece of the project and do that one first.

It means the first three months are committed, because taking over somebody else's codebase and getting genuinely useful in it takes longer than four weeks — the first month is largely learning your systems, and cancelling at that point leaves you worse off than before you started. After month three it runs month to month and you can end it with 30 days' notice. No annual lock-in and no auto-escalating rate.

That is the outcome you are paying for, and it is a fair question to ask before signing. A partnership buys ownership and availability, not a ticket quota: dependencies and frameworks still move underneath you, security patches still land, and monitoring still needs somebody reading it. If genuinely quiet months repeat, the honest answer is to move you to the ad-hoc hourly rate rather than keep billing a partnership you have outgrown — we would rather lose the line item than have you resent it.

A project if the thing does not exist yet and has a defined finish line — a site, an MVP, a platform. A partnership if it already exists and the work is recurring: updates, security patches, and the next set of features. A project usually becomes a partnership at launch, which is the point at which the recurring work actually begins. If you are unsure, say so when you get in touch — a straight 'you do not need us monthly' is a normal outcome.

You do, milestone by milestone. The code lives in repositories and accounts in your name from day one, and our rights in each milestone pass to you when its invoice is paid; until then you can review and test it. General tooling and patterns we bring with us stay ours, and you get a perpetual, royalty-free licence to use them as part of your project. We will not knowingly include an open-source component whose licence would make you publish your own code, unless you agree in writing. The law on copyright in AI-assisted code is unsettled, so the transfer covers whatever rights exist rather than promising that every line is copyrightable. We never name you or show your project without your written consent, and white-label agency work is never listed in our portfolio.

We use AI coding tools, currently Anthropic's Claude, under commercial terms that do not train on your code, and we will tell you which tools were used on any piece of work. Your confidential information and personal data never go into a tool whose terms allow training on it. Every line delivered is reviewed by the engineer, who stays responsible for it. Before work is committed, type checking, unit tests, linting and an import check run, and an automated WCAG 2.1 AA check runs against every public route and fails on a single violation. A project is accepted only when its automated tests pass, its public routes pass those accessibility checks and its core workflow completes end to end. These checks run locally rather than on a hosted build server, we rerun them in front of you on the call, and an automated accessibility check is a floor, not an audit or a certificate.